ight now, one billion people are starving. That’s one in every six people on this planet. The number of these hungry people is roughly equivalent to the populations of the United States, Indonesia, Brazil, Pakistan, and Bangladesh combined.

The world reached this bleak milestone in the middle of June this year. With the global human population continuing to explode and resources being stripped at an increasing rate, the outlook is not good. More people will go hungry. Less will have access to the nutrients their bodies need. And more will succumb to the illnesses that take advantage of the malnourished body. More people will die.

But this is only half the story. The insidious corollary to the global hunger crisis is that even more people—at least half the world’s population, according to a 2004 United Nations report—suffer from micronutrient malnutrition. People suffering from this “hidden hunger” may consume sufficient calories, but lack suitable amounts of essential nutrients, vitamins, and minerals. These legions of nutrient-starved people largely reside in developing countries. Their plight is dire. Even mild micronutrient deficiencies can increase infant mortality rates and lead to cognitive impairment and immune system problems in children, among other serious health issues.

In addressing global hunger and micronutrient malnourishment, biotechnology holds potential solutions: specifically, nutritionally enhanced, transgenic crops. The technology that makes these plants possible took center stage in January 2000 with the publication of a brief but high-impact Science paper on the creation of a prototype that would become known as “Golden Rice,” packed with beta-carotene (also called pro-vitamin A), the precursor to vitamin A and an essential component of healthy diets.¹ Genetically modified (GM) crop plants were already becoming commonplace, but existing genetic changes mostly endowed plants with desirable producer traits, such as herbicide or pest resistance in soybeans or cotton plants. To create Golden Rice, European scientists, with funding from the Rockefeller Foundation, inserted bacterial transgenes into the latent pro-vitamin A biosynthesis molecular pathways in wild-type rice, which contains no pro-vitamin A. This modification transformed the normally nutrient-poor endosperm—or kernel—of milled rice into a source of beta-carotene.

Their work was trumpeted on the cover of TIME magazine with the headline: “This rice could save a million kids a year,” preventing night blindness and other disorders caused by low vitamin A, a nutrient often lacking in developing world diets. While it got people talking and thinking about the potential of genetic engineering to salve the world’s hunger pangs, Golden Rice also set up a contentious debate that still rages today. “[Golden Rice] was something that attracted the attention of both opponents and proponents in the same way,” recalls Peter Beyer, a plant biochemist at the University of Freiburg in Germany and one of Golden Rice’s inventors.

Nutritionists took Beyer and his co-inventor, now-retired biologist Ingo Potrykus, to task, pointing out that Golden Rice could do little to address vitamin A deficiencies in the developing world because its beta-carotene content was too low. Beyer says that anti-GM groups “hijacked” the issue and used Golden Rice as a springboard to rail against all GM crops. Largely due to this controversy, along with political and technological obstacles, nearly 10 years after it was unveiled, Golden Rice has yet to make its wide debut in the paddies of the developing (and vitamin A–deficient) world. “Once [the science] is there, your initial belief is that your work is done, but by far it is not,” says Beyer.

But Beyer, Potrykus, and several collaborators have continued to forge on, refining the technology that made Golden Rice possible and amassing a larger consortium to try to get the enhanced staple crop into the dinner bowls of the people who most need it. And the failure of Golden Rice to leap directly into the world’s rice paddies has not dissuaded scientists from trying the same with other enhanced crops: carrots with twice the calcium, tomatoes with 20% more antioxidants, cassava boosted with additional iron, protein, and vitamins. There are dozens of reports in the scientific literature of common food plants that have been engineered to produce increased levels of one nutrient or another. One cannot yet find vast paddies of Golden Rice waving in the tropical sun or fields of super-cassava blanketing African farmland, but this may be about to change.

More than 250 million sub-Saharan Africans rely on the cassava, a starchy tuber native to South and Central America, as their staple food. Cassava supplies 38.6% of the caloric requirements in some parts of Africa, where hunger and nutrient deficiencies grip the populace and more than 40% of global cassava production takes place.

But cassava is not a particularly nutrient-rich food. It lacks much of the iron, zinc, and vitamins A and E that healthy bodies need to grow. University of Nebraska–Lincoln biochemist Ed Cahoon has worked for several years as part of the BioCassava Plus program, which aims to improve the nutritional profile of cassava through genetic engineering.

Launched in July 2005 with $7.5 million from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation’s Grand Challenges in Global Health Initiative, the program’s overarching goal is to develop what essentially amounts to a super-charged cassava plant variety—one with increased levels of iron, zinc, protein, vitamins, and resistance to the cassava mosaic and brown streak viruses plaguing African farmers.

The program has started by developing separate GM cassavas with each of these nutritional improvements one by one. Cahoon and his colleagues have produced a beta-carotene–enhanced cassava by inserting genes that impart higher levels of the pro-vitamin (and give an orangey glow to the normally pallid root). They inserted a gene called phytoene synthase (psy) originally derived from the soil bacterium Erwinia herbicola (and also used to develop Golden Rice), which codes for an enzyme that catalyzes a crucial step in the beta-carotene biosynthetic pathway.

The researchers packaged psy into the plasmid of a disarmed Agrobacterium—the workhorse of plant genetic engineering—together with a root-specific promoter derived from potatoes, a 5´ leader sequence consisting of plant DNA that shuttles the protein into root-bound plastids, and the standard 3´ untranslated region (UTR) from mRNA. Cahoon recalls the first time he saw the successfully engineered cassava root (the part of the plant that’s eaten), in 2007. “It was a good day,” Cahoon says. “[The cassava] was noticeably orange.”

Meanwhile, Cahoon decided to try inserting the Arabidopsis gene, 1-deoxy-d-xylulose 5-phosphate synthase (dxs), which regulates the isoprenoid pathway, a set of biochemical reactions further upstream from the biosynthetic step in which psy is involved. Inserting dxs, which increases the amount of chemical precursors to beta-carotene, was “like turning up the whole isoprenoid pathway,” Cahoon says. He found that inserting both the psy and dxs genes resulted in a cassava even more orange than the roots with only the psy modification—and with 30 times more beta-carotene than normal roots.

After running more greenhouse trials on plants with both the single and double genetic modifications and choosing the cassava with the most beta-carotene, Cahoon and his team sent tissue samples to Puerto Rico, where scientists propagated clonal offspring. Now, the cassava plants are growing in field trials, which Cahoon recently visited. “They’re looking good,” he says. “For the most part they look like the control plants,” which contain normal levels of beta-carotene.

Eventually, the BioCassava Plus program hopes to move into its second phase—set to commence in 2010 with an additional infusion of funding—in which nutritional modifications to increase iron, zinc, protein, vitamins, and virus resistance will be combined into one cassava plant. “We would actually address all of the deficiencies in cassava in a single cultivar,” says Richard Sayre, a molecular biologist at the Danforth Plant Science Center in St. Louis and director of the BioCassava Plus program. But, as he and Cahoon learned from Golden Rice, getting the science right is just the first step.

There are reasons Cahoon and his colleagues picked Puerto Rico as the site of field tests for the beta-carotene–boosted cassava. Puerto Rico enjoys a tropical climate like much of the core cassava growing areas of Africa but, equally important, the island territory operates under the laws and regulations of the United States, not Africa. “It’s not Africa, but getting in the field in Puerto Rico is a much simpler process than getting through the regulatory processes in Africa,” Cahoon says.

It’s this regulatory tangle facing GM crops in much of the world, including Africa, that largely explains why many transgenic plants that could address widespread nutrient deficiencies are trapped in laboratories instead of growing in soil.

According to Val Giddings, president of Prometheus Agricultural Biotech, most of the restrictions stem from European politics, as influenced by vocal anti-GM groups. Giddings, who helped craft the US Department of Agriculture’s GM crop regulations in the early 1990s as a geneticist at the agency’s Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service (APHIS), says that European countries have effectively exported their restrictive regulations by “making their overseas development programs a slave to their domestic political policies.” In 2004, American officials entreated EU officials to reassure three African nations—Zimbabwe, Zambia and Mozambique—that the hundreds of thousands of tons of GM food aid they had rejected was in fact safe; the EU refused. Add to this the influence that European importers and governments have over food producers in Asia and Africa, and the developing world’s soil is rendered pretty infertile for GM crops. Robert Paarlberg, a Harvard political scientist and author of the book Starved for Science, concurs about the difficulties in getting biotech crops into developing nations. “It’s an informal chain of influence,” he says, “that discourages African farmers from planting any GM crops at all.”

Even in the United States, GM regulations are cumbersome and require a team of people to navigate. Agricultural biotech entrepreneurs, like drug developers, often cite a 10-year time frame to go from initial discovery to saleable product. But compared to the European system, the US regulatory system is manageable. For the beta-carotene–fortified cassava to gain approval from the Department of Agriculture (USDA), for instance, the agency would require data indicating that the introduced genetic construct stably integrated, that the introduced gene does not cause plant disease or produce an infectious agent, and that the cassava was not modified using a gene derived from human or animal pathogens, among other criteria. “It may feel cumbersome to people, but I don’t think [the regulations] are unreasonable,” says Mark Manary, a pediatrician at Washington University in St. Louis who collaborates on the BioCassava Plus program and spends more than half the year working with aid groups in the African nation of Malawi.

However, even if scientists get past the regulatory hurdles associated with any GM foods, there is another practical obstacle that stands in the way of fields full of nutrient-packed cassava or carrots: These foods will cost more than the non-modified versions, and the people who most need them are also the least able to afford them.

In a basement lab at a DuPont research facility, a technician loads bright green soybean tissue samples into a “gene gun,” an unassuming contraption that looks more like a toaster oven than a firearm, and shoots gold nanoparticles coated with DNA molecules into soybean cells at more than 1500 kilometers per hour. The machine makes a muffled pop and the deed is done. DNA will incorporate into the soybean genome and inhibit the activity of fatty acid saturase-2, an enzyme that normally catalyzes the biochemical conversion of oleic to linoleic acid in the soybean plant. Plant molecular biologist Ted Klein stands by, watching. “If we knock out the expression of that enzyme, specifically, in the seed at the right time, then there’s no detrimental impact on the whole plant,” he says.

Elsewhere in DuPont’s Wilmington, Del.–based experimental station, giant walk-in coolers feature lines of bright fluorescent bulbs glowing above rows of the modified soybean plants that grew from tissues earlier shot with the gene gun. While they may not address nutrient deficiencies in poverty-stricken corners of the globe, these plants may one day reduce the need to use hydrogenated oils—AKA the dreaded trans fats—in frying, for example. For now, the plants simply stretch to gather as much of the light as possible; eventually, they will produce oil that is more stable in storage and cooking conditions, with 20% less saturated fat and a higher proportion of oleic acid than normal soy oil. The company will screen these soybeans in the grow room looking for the best phenotypes, which develop after several semi-random gene gunshots. DuPont and Pioneer Hi-Bred, the DuPont company that managed the research and development of the technology behind the plants, known as Plenish, hopes to sell “high oleic oil” from the beans to food processing companies, restaurant chains, and other industrial customers around the world as early as the end of this year. With such a market, the company isn’t too concerned about finding customers who can afford the technology.

The oil has already been approved by Mexican and Canadian regulatory agencies. “Now we’re just waiting for the USDA,” says Susan Knowlton, a DuPont research manager.

Other scientists are also trying to tweak the nutritional content of common foods. Kendal Hirschi, a Baylor University pediatrician and geneticist, has genetically engineered a carrot that contains twice the calcium of normal carrots by upping the expression of a plant calcium transporter (sCAX1) in the roots with the addition of an Arabidopsis gene construct. He’s even performed a pilot nutritional study, which was funded by the National Institutes of Health, where subjects absorbed about 40% more calcium from his carrots than they did from normal carrots.² Feeding studies are essential if nutritionally enhanced GM foods are going to have a real-world impact, Hirschi says. “None of these improvements are any good until we actually show they’re good in the food supply.”

In order to ensure that the technology has a buyer, that could perhaps compensate for the expense of distributing it free or below cost to the developing world, Hirschi is trying to attract attention from large food company General Mills, which has expressed some interest in his carrots as a way to make thicker canned soups. (Calcium chloride is often added to foods as a thickener.)

Cathie Martin, a geneticist at the John Innes Centre in Norwich, UK, has developed a tomato variety that may prove useful to consumers worldwide, not just the malnourished. Martin’s deep purple tomato has 20% higher levels of anthocyanins, antioxidants that may guard the body against chronic diseases and cancer. She and colleagues recently showed that mice consuming a diet that includes her GM tomatoes, whose boosted antioxidant profile is thanks to two transcription factors from snapdragons, lived an average of 30% longer than mice that consumed regular tomatoes.³ Western countries—where people tend not to get the recommended 5 fruits and vegetables per day, and the giant food companies that operate therein—can play a role in moving these types of GM foods closer to a widespread reality, Martin says. “You’ve got to get the food companies interested in sowing better foods,” she says. “If you can improve tomatoes, then you can get the good things in fruit and vegetables into something that people actually eat.”

“We know how this story ends,” says Val Giddings—nutritionally fortified, GM foods will get into the global marketplace and the mouths of the people who need them. “You can’t stop the tide. Biotech will, in time, become the new conventional agriculture. The question is how long will it be until that happens, and what, if anything, can we do to accelerate the process.”

There are hints now emerging that bear out Giddings’ prediction. Since first introducing the world to Golden Rice in 2000, Beyer’s collaborators have developed new versions of the beta-carotene–enhanced grain. Golden Rice 2, which Beyer says will be available on the market in the Philippines and in Bangladesh within the next 2 or 3 years, contains 30–35 micrograms of beta-carotene/gram—more than 30 times more beta-carotene than the original kernel introduced in 2000.⁴ Beyer and his colleagues accomplished this massive increase by tinkering with the promoter sequences used in the genetic modification, by changing the source of one of the gene inserts from daffodils to maize (which boosts beta-carotene production), and other subtle tweaks to the science behind Golden Rice. This new version recently completed feeding trials⁵ and is now growing in experimental plots in the Philippines and Bangladesh.

But the research was relatively easy—to create a GM product that regulators and citizens would accept, Beyer needed help. Funding came from philanthropic organizations, such as the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, and government aid agencies, such as the United States Agency for International Development. A private-public partnership between Golden Rice’s inventors and the agrichemicals company Syngenta, along with several collaborations with research institutions throughout Asia, made the imminent market introduction of Golden Rice possible, Beyer says. The project is now conducting the social marketing research and local rice variety back-crosses, which will blend the beta-carotene trait into locally popular rice varieties—both necessary to successfully and safely introduce the crop and get farmers to grow the plants.

The BioCassava Plus program has also recently seen significant progress in its goal to introduce biofortified foods into the developing world. Director Richard Sayre says that the program’s pro-vitamin A cassava plants have been approved for field trials in Nigeria, the world’s number one consumer of the food. In July, the country planted between 4000 and 8000 m2 with Cahoon’s two-gene GM cassava, the first GM product Nigeria has field tested. “We are quite proud of that,” Sayre says. To advance the BioCassava Plus program to the next stage, Sayre says that more donor money will be needed. He says that the program is “planning on approaching other donors,” but declined to name them.

Navigating through Nigeria’s regulatory approval process was no small task, Sayre says, for which the BioCassava Plus program enlisted the help of Nigeria’s National Root Crop Research Institute (NRCRI) and a Nigerian product developer who was a former member of the county’s National Biosafety Committee. “We think that was an important part of our strategy,” Sayre says, “because it meant that the government was buying into the process.” The Nigerian regulations, for example, required experimenters to dig a fence around the experimental plots a meter deep into the soil to prevent burrowing animals from carrying off bits of the GM cassava. The Nigerian regulations were “redundancies upon redundancies of protection,” according to Sayre.

To ensure the cassava gets where it needs to go, the project will again call upon the infrastructure and local knowledge of national agriculture research institutions such as the NRCRI and nongovernmental organizations to distribute the cassava plants to poor farmers for free or for a nominal fee. The BioCassava Plus project will utilize the traditional dissemination scheme—where farmers share cuttings of their successful plants with friends and neighbors—to further disseminate their enhanced cassava. (The Gates Foundation, in fact, requires that the technology come with royalty-free humanitarian license.) Poor farmers can get and share cuttings for free, while those who make more than $10,000 per year must pay a royalty fee to companies like Monsanto that donated enabling technologies (patented Agrobacterium transformation systems, and gene promotors, for example) to the project. Sayre also says that a “very critical” part of the BioCassava project is to eventually transfer research and production capabilities and responsibilities to African labs, scientists, and countries. “I put myself out of business in many ways,” he says.

Other GM advocates say they hope cassava is not the only biofortified food to be planted in Nigeria. “What I’d like to see is hundreds of millions of very poor people improving their nutritional status and improving their health status,” says Lawrence Kent, senior program officer of agricultural development at the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, which funds genetic research in biofortification, but also donates money to efforts aimed at conventional fortification, supplementation, and dietary diversification. “We’re hoping some initial successes are going to trigger additional interest, especially from national governments. If we can help get more nutrients into these staple foods, we really can help millions of people improve their lives.

The original version of "Where's the Super Food?" included a photo caption stating that Golden Rice 2 has more than 30% more beta-carotene than the first Golden Rice. It should have read that Golden Rice 2 has more than 30 times more beta-carotene than the first Golden Rice. Also, the article gives the title of Robert Paarlberg's book as Starving for Science, when it is in fact Starved for Science. The Scientist regrets these errors.

This is a biochemistry question for the researcher: what about the energy requirements for vitamin A synthesis? Those enzymes (GM or not) require investments of energy and micronutrients for cofactors, or don't they?

I would be surprised if the GMO plants did not have higher energy or nutrient requirements than the controls. I know that Dr. Cahoon mentioned that the control plots and the GMO plots looked relatively similar, but is it sustainable in the long run? Or is it a free lunch, biochemically speaking?

Thank You,

Here are a few articles that should dampen GMO enthusiasm in general.

Please note that these are just pointing in the direction of the bodies of research they reflect.

This comment does not directly address the issue per se of increasing nutrients in crops.
___________________________________________
Everything You HAVE TO KNOW about Dangerous Genetically Modified Foods
Posted by: Dr. Mercola
October 17 2009

LINK
___________________________________________
Organic Farming Could Feed Africa.
Traditional practices increase yield by 128 per cent in east Africa, says UN

By Daniel Howden in Nairobi
Wednesday, 22 October 2008

LINK
__________________________________
Organic Farming Could Feed the World
The Ram's Horn, July 2007

LINK
__________________________________

Far more detailed or specific references could be given but these will lead to those references for those who wish to pursue them.

The movie, The Future of Food, was made in 2004. Even so, it still provides a good explanation of why a lot of people are very concerned about GMOs. The entire movie can be viewed for free online at LINK

On the BBC recently in the UK there was a TV program looking at food availability for the global population, saying that about a sixth of the world is at this very moment starving, similar to that cited in this article. The reasons given in the program for this travesty were multi-faceted and have been quite well versed over the last decade in all media formats: natural disasters; political instability resulting in lack of coordinated production; historical land management ? deforestation and resultant soil erosion and related run-off leading to soil nutrient leaching, intensive farming lowering water-tables (an increasing worry in India which provides so much food at the moment); socio-and-economic factors ? appropriation of land to produce food for nations with poor agricultural resources in exchange for oil and minerals etc diverting food from starving locals, Western meat-centric demands (20-40x more resources required to produce a steak cf a plate of vegetables), former agricultural land transformed into bio-fuel crops for gas hungry societies, population pressure relating to desired family sizes for socio, economic and cultural reasons. They gloomily predicted that by 2050 with the total human population increasing to around the 9 billion mark, with a larger percentage of people eating dairy and meat products than now (with development towards a more ?Western? life-style), and in the context of global warming reducing the current area of land for food production (sea level rise, increased evapo-transpiration and more extreme weather events like floods and droughts), the fraction and total number of people starving is due to rise ever more drastically.

I found the program very sobering, and listened very carefully to proposed solutions. Again these were multi-faceted and too many to all mention, examples are: rethink bio-fuels regulation ? legislate that only land that cannot be used for food can have bio-fuels grown on them; increase non-CO2 producing energy supplies; steer away from meat consumption?And one of them - use higher-yielding greater-nutrient GM crops. As a physical geographer / environmentalist at heart, when I first heard of GM crops as an undergraduate I thought to myself ?do we really want to be actively introducing (in this case modified) new DNA into an environment bearing in mind that history bears witness to ?unexpected consequences? ? introduced grey squirrels out-competing native Reds, minks escaping from farms and decimating small mammal populations?? That is, are ? literally ? Wild Cards too risky?

But if faced with the choice of risking unpleasant ?unexpected consequences? versus knowingly not implementing GM crops that might save billions of lives, I think we basically need to take the risk and implement them?

The editorials and articles on enhanced genetically engineered foods have glossed over the issue of intellectual property.

Perhaps the Gates Foundation is planning to place genetically engineered foods in the public domain, and perhaps other developers are too, but the free availability and use of the crops is a key issue. The IP ownership question is one that I would like to see covered in any article about GM foods.

There are also serious dangers in creating crop monocultures, and these dangers can be addressed without taking a boutique organic approach to agriculture.

Not all of the objections to GM foods are based on fanatical environmentalism.

Just read the article and not going to into a long speech but i can see "Helmut Beierbeck" point on this one....

On the chance of being labeled a "baby hater", sorry, but here goes:
Instead of feeding these people for their lifespan and their neverending offsprings lives, why isnt birth control being implemented?
Or is it and it is not being complied with?
Something needs to be done about the biological programming of people so they realize having one baby after another is not necessarily whats best for the family or the world.
This is true, especially in these times when even drinking water is becoming scarce.
What are the precious children and their children going to do when you cant get a drink of water? Also, the thought of eating nothing but GE foods is scary at best, especially since the ramifications of doing so for ones entire life is not known.

I realize that beta-carotene isn't the only micronutrient missing from cassava - it seems to be mostly starch. But why not simply replace some of the cassava with yam, and you got your beta-carotene.

I guess it's at fast food restaurants. Let's not expect consumers to make healthy choices, or eat less. Let's genetically engineer the soybean to avoid transfats in fried foods. Can they get the acrylamide out also?

The GM lobby people don't understand that their potential clients are quite intelligent and don't want to be turned into serfs.

If the problem is micronutrients, what's wrong with easily-distributed food supplements?

Basically, various industry lobbies - from lead in petrol to cigarettes for people who can't afford a meal - have gone much too far, and everyone is aware of the situation.

STOP POISONING PEOPLE and sack your stupid publicity geeks.

Some of the reasons for focusing on certain foods for inserting nutrients we take for granted with our supermarket existence have to do with the culture of the consumers. Cassava and rice are staple foods in forest communities while carrots and green leafy vegetables may not be.

Additionally, something quite rightly feared in forest communities as a leading cause of death is diarrhea, so trying to introduce foods that would significantly alter the consistency of stools would be naturally avoided by most.

What we reaaaaallllly need is to have the same capability that termites have to convert cellulose into sugars. Then we can eat sawdust! Seriously, though, IMHO this pep rally for GM frankenfoods has more to do with the side upon which your bread is buttered than any real science. An added "plus" is the unknown consequences of introducing new genetic material into the biosphere. Mark my words, our grandchildren will curse us!

As a senior research scientist who was involved with breeding more efficient crops both in yield and in product quality, particularly in cereals and cassava,there are natural genetic diversity in beta carotene content in cassava storage roots. Such genetic diversity was documented at both international centers for agricultural research belonging to CGIAR system, i.e., the IITA in Nigeria, CIAT in Colombia, as well as in other national research institutes(e.g., India, Brazil..).These genetic sources with higher beta carotene content have been already used in conventional breeding programs to improve the vitamin A level in new cassava cultivars.Why then the intentionally exaggerated role of genetic engineering in solving world hunger and malnutrition?.However,I dont degrade other roles fo genetic engineering technology, particularly in drugs production.

GMO development is driven by profit hungry transnational corporations. Vitamin A deficiency could be much better addressed by promoting polyculture farming with vitamin A-rich green vegetables, especially in urban areas, simultaneously providing many other nutritional benefits. But this approach would not generate the huge corporate profits from selling patented golden rice. Urban organic gardening and agroecology are the real alternative to industrial agriculture, not GE crops. This is the advanced agriculture not the GMO with its serious social, ecological, health and nutritional threats, now increasingly documented in peer-reviewed literature. Check out the latest Nature (September 3) for "GM crops: Battlefield" if you think the corporate sector is neutral with regard to research on GM crops, especially when negative findings are reported. A cutting edge paper demonstrating the huge potential of organic agriculture: Badgley et al., 2007. Can organic agriculture feed the world? Renewable Agriculture and Food Systems 22: 86-108.

David Schwartzman, PhD

I guess eating carrots is too simple for people who need carotene?

By blocking the adoption of advanced agriculture in undernourished parts of the world, the anti-GMO nuts are perpetuating a holocaust of starvation that makes Hitler look like a small time thug. Talk about irony.

Unfortunately for the world, the influence of the greater EU community on the view of many nations with regards to GM crops has limited the growth of this area and has put limits on plant scientist in the EU from addressing specific issues. EU policy pushed forward by various green parties has shaped the science strategy of plant scientists in the EU as well as the policies of companies, ranging from small biotechs to large-scale agri-businesses. This has significantly curtailed the creativeness of the EU scientific community in this area based upon a political philosophy, rather than hard and fast science. In other words, the baby was tossed out with the bath water.

As CSO of a small U.S. based biotech with a sister company in Finland, I can attest first hand to the tremendous downward governmental pressures to not pursue certain plant science strategies. Prior to acquiring the company in Finland, the scientists there were designing a number of foods that were enhanced in micronutrients, but ultimately these projects were canceled by previous management because they could not be done profitably under glass, i.e. in a BSL-3 greenhouse. Upon taking over the science direction of the company, I instilled a new attitude that open field agriculture of these products is possible and safe.

It is critical to remember that this field of science is highly regulated by the USDA and the FDA, extensive field testing is done that must then pass through the scrutiny of these agencies. The suggestion that these trials are not done to test the possible outcomes, as suggested by another post to this blog, is indeed ludicrous. In that post, it was suggested that these trials are essentially rigged so that the results are tilted in the direction of the company. This suggest a serious breach of ethics on the part of the company's scientists as well as a complete failure of our regulatory agencies. I highly doubt that either of these events have happened.

In the long run, our company is making biologic pharmaceuticals in plants using a unique strategy in an effort to lower costs to not only Americans, but for all peoples of the world. These pharmaceuticals are inherently expensive in the current marketplace. In addition, we are making specific changes to enhance the agronomic properties of a plant in order to extend its growing range, requirements for water, and so forth. Are we evil, no I don't think so. Are we working within a highly regulated environment and are we good stewards of the earth's resources, yes. So to suggest that we have a win at all costs strategy is just not acceptable.

Until agricultural technology companies allow independent scientific research results to be published, "without restriction", the public will never trust them with our food supply.

Please read this opinion on SciAm.com and contact your legislators to allow scientific research findings to be published regardless of the findings.

LINK

The Scientist.com should also advocate a similar position if it truly believes in science & food safety over corporate profits.

RE: Where's the Super Food? by Bob Grant
The Scientist Vol 23 Issue 9 p30

There one simple thing we can do which takes less than a minute each day and sends food to fight World Hunger.
==========================================================================
The Hunger Site: A Click a day sends FREE FOOD to fight World Hunger and
Malnutrition Diseases

LINK
==========================================================================

I have done this for years. No purchase required or charges incurred.

It is only a small personal effort which when combined with the clicks of others can mount up to something which contributes to the health and "greater good" of many who are hungry and malnourished.

Please do make this small daily effort!

Sincerely,

Jesse Creel
6649 McKibbon Rd
North Branch, MI 48461
810-931-9376
jessecreel2@gmail.com

--
================================================================
The Hunger Site: A Click a day sends FREE FOOD to fight World Hunger and
Malnutrition Diseases

LINK

Our intensive agricultural practices have stripped soils of their nutrient content, and that's reflected in the lower nutrient content of our food. So the solution now is to futz with the genetic makeup of the food so it has higher nutrient content? There is so much wrong with this picture, I don't even know where to begin.

We have the moral obligation to save the inhabitants of our planet who are starving. I believe that the solution given by the biofortified food plants should be only part of our plan, because these people need much more in order to lead a decent human life, and find happiness some day.

LINK ">LINK